This treatment of empires as entities crucially sustained by discourse has replaced the old-fashioned way of doing imperial history, which tended to concentrate on things like guns, gold, steamships, cotton and copra. Hopwood writes well about the Middle East as a theatre of European fantasy and he has fine material on which to draw. Robert Irwin's anthology of Arabic literature, Night and Horses and the Desert is published by The Penguin Press next month. Sometimes we know the name of the concubine, sometimes we do not even know that. Ithaca Press, pounds 35, 332pp, inside the Seraglio: private lives of the Sultans by John Freely, viking, pounds 20, 345pp. Those who publish on the subject are likely to be accused of bad faith at one level or another. The truth is we do not know much about the sex life of, say, the 16th-century sultan, Selim the Grim. But Rycaut studied the realities of Turkish power and his work systematically covered government, religion and morality and the armed forces. He includes digressions on the building of the Suez Canal, the social programme of the Saint Simonians, and the (not at all sexy) careers of Mark Sykes and Orde Wingate. On the jacket of, there is a reproduction of what looks like an old postcard photo of a young Algerian Arab woman. At first I was not sure I was going to like Freely's book, as the early pages chronicle a dull succession of Balkan battles, murdered viziers, and occasional references to concubines. Nevertheless, Freely's narrative does acquire passion and pathos as it approaches modern times.

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After so much excitement, one turns to Derek Hopwood's more soothing Sexual Encounters in the Middle East, which is less tightly focused and not so obviously ideologically driven. Even Jane Austen becomes more interesting if one reads a novel like Mansfield Park to discover how it "sublimates the agonies of Caribbean existence". Bored with teaching Chaucer or Jane Austen, they have found a more politicised, grandly theoretical role as the critics of Orientalism and imperialist discourse. This deals with the real existence over hundreds of years of exactly that institution in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Contemporary Turks would not have dared to write on such a subject while Western observers, who did, really had no reliable sources of information. Freely's has an evocative account of the harem's physical decay: "The windows were shuttered and the rooms in almost total darkness; an old brass bedstead under a towering canopy was shrouded in cobwebs, its rotting mattress giving off an odour of sepulchral decay. Writing about Orientalism is an enterprise fraught with ambiguity. As he challengingly announces early on, he will conclude "with the observation that the immense variability of narratives of space suggests the possibility of an emancipatory process that could potentially lead to the construction of non-hegemonic discourses and practices". Here, for example, is the Master of Bellhaven: "the attraction, the spell of Arabia, as it is frequently called, is a sickness of the imagination.

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George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert now take precedence over Stamford Raffles and General Bugeaud. Published in 1817, this interminable set of oriental stories in verse is presented as a representative of a class of "romances and erotica which titillated their Western readers with juicy fantasies about oriental women and accounts of clandestine exploits in well-guarded harems". I do not think Schick has read Thomas Moore's Lallah Rookh either. And there is the paranoid sultan, Abd al-Hamid II, who had a passion for operas with happy endings and for Sherlock Holmes. Such a bibliography is over the top for a book whose main text is only 236 pages. He has read Said, Kabbani and other labourers in this field. He juggles concepts derived from Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, Helene Cixous, Homi Bhabha and so on with mesmerising ease. Sometimes he corrects their misreadings, sometimes he"s them as authorities, and at other times, he records their disagreements without expressing an opinion. The Erotic Margin by Irvin C Schick, verso, pounds 20, 315pp, sexual Encounters in the Middle East by Derek Hopwood. Schick's book ranges widely over a mass of popular and highbrow literature, some of which is offensive and racist, but some not.